Star Wars Pinball developer Zen Studios has revealed its next table based on Star Wars Rebels.

Due on the week of 27th April for Zen's stable of pinball series - including Pinball FX2, Zen Pinball 2, and Star Wars Pinball - this upcoming table will be based on Disney XD's animated TV series. As such, it will encompass seven missions that include the show's roster of characters and vehicles with fully-animated TIE fighters and the starship Ghost.

Back in 2013 Zen Studios wowed Eurogamer contributor Rich Stanton with its Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back table. "It seems ludicrous to say it about a pinball table, but this feels inextricable from the universe, its elements combining into something truly evocative," he wrote in his glowing Star Wars Pinball: The Empire Strikes Back review.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1745426Fri, 27 Mar 2015 09:10:00 +0000You've got the touch: How a mobile game gave birth to a human child

Adriaan de Jongh wants to make games that help people fall in love. It's a bold ambition for a bold man. And depending on how you attribute the origins of one's romantic relationship, he may already have succeeded.

The Dutch independent developer first made the scene with his local multiplayer iPad game Fingle in 2011. The novel title by de Jongh's studio Game Oven could best be described as Twister for your fingers. Players would have to keep their digits on moving targets while their opponent would do their best to manoeuvre their fingers around yours. Inevitable players would touch each other.

Sometimes it would do a lot more than that, however. Speaking to de Jongh at GDC, the eccentric developer boasts that Fingle was responsible for Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail's ongoing relationship with software developer Adriel Wallick. "They have a relationship because of Fingle," he tells me at a Dutch local multiplayer party at San Francisco's Cartoon Museum. "They met two years ago at PAX East in Boston, happened to be on the same plane, and when they got back they told me 'hey, you know what? We played Fingle for three hours!' They credit their relationship to me very often." I have since verified this story with Ismail, and it is indeed true.

The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna follows Uriel, Elohim's messenger, as he explores "a strange, hidden part of the simulation on a mission of mercy and redemption in an attempt to free the souls of the damned at all costs", publisher Devolver Digital said.

Road to Gehenna includes four episodes, new puzzles and new characters.

Competitive side-scrolling racing game SpeedRunners has sold 600K copies on Steam Early Access.

That's quite a lot when one factors in that this simple collaboration between its prototype developer DoubleDutch Games and co-developer/publisher tinyBuild Games has yet to see an official release. tinyBuild noted that players have cumulatively been logging in more than 1m sessions a month.

]]>http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-03-23-speedrunners-has-sold-600k-copies-on-steam-early-access
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1744637Mon, 23 Mar 2015 23:34:00 +0000Game of Thrones: Episode 3 is due this week on all platforms

Game of Thrones: Episode 3, The Sword in the Darkness, is due this week on PC, Mac, PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, iOS and Android, developer Telltale has announced.

PC, Mac, and North American PlayStation users will receive it tomorrow.

Xbox and European PlayStation players will receive it the following day on the 25th.

Remember when mobile phones were monstrously-proportioned beasts that would bloat your trouser pocket in the most unsightly fashion? If so, the chances are you also experienced the subtle transition from gigantic talk-tech to truly pocket-sized alternatives - but the race to miniaturise mobile telecommunications was somewhat short-lived. The arrival of touchscreen smartphones has seen the pendulum swing violently back in the opposite direction; the iPhone kicked things off with a 3.5-inch display in 2007, but since then its Android and Windows Phone-based rivals have pushed the envelope dramatically, leading to the rise of the somewhat irksome portmanteau "Phablet".

Samsung's 2011 Galaxy Note - equipped with what was then considered to be an absolutely ludicrous 5.3-inch screen - was the first mainstream device of this type, and the Note range has thus far sat alongside the mainline Galaxy S in Samsung's portfolio. However, Google isn't offering the general public the same option; the latest entry in its long-running Nexus range comes in one size and one size only: massive. Produced in conjunction with hardware partners such as HTC, Samsung, LG and - this year - Motorola, the Nexus lineage of handsets offers a pure and unsullied version of Google's Android OS, and it is via this family of phones that the company pushes the latest iterations of its software. That means if you're not a fan of big-screen phones yet you subscribe wholeheartedly to the Nexus program, you're going to have to suck it up and come to terms with owning what initially feels like an absurdly big handset - unless you're happy to sit it out and retain last year's Nexus 5, of course.

The Nexus 6's massive 5.96-inch AMOLED panel is arguably the phone's biggest talking point, offering a pixel density of 493ppi. A quad-core Snapdragon 805 chipset is responsible for moving all those lovely pixels around, and while this isn't cutting-edge anymore, the fact that it is accompanied by 3GB of RAM helps to keep things fast and smooth. As ever, there's no way to expand the storage on the handset, but this is the first Nexus phone to ditch the 16GB option and instead offer 32 and 64GB flavours.

The upcoming iPhone and Android phone versions of Hearthstone will be compatible with its PC, Mac, iPad and Android tablet counterpart, Blizzard has confirmed.

"It will be your exact same account, so all your cards on tablet or PC will be available on your phone too," said Hearthstone lead designer Eric Dodds in an interview with Gamespot. "When you start a match on a phone, you could be playing someone on another phone, someone on a tablet, on a PC, who knows? It's all one big ecosystem."

One concern with playing Hearthsone on the go is how quickly it will drain a smartphone's battery due to its always online requirement. "One thing we're constantly thinking about is how to make the most of the phone's battery," Dodds said. "I don't know if it uses a lot of data. You have to have a constant connection though. I wouldn't recommend playing it on a train."

Driver Speedboat Paradise, a Hydro Thunder-like racer, is coming to iOS and Android devices in April, Ubisoft has announced.

This aquatic spinoff's premise is as follows: "You're a young, reckless driver trying to make a name for yourself in the ruthless world of underground speedboat racing. But your quest for fame and fortune takes an unexpected turn when you cross paths with legendary cop John Tanner." And to think all this time I didn't even know speedboat racing had a ruthless underground world.

Driver Speedboat Paradise had a soft launch in Australia and New Zealand back in December, but soon it will be available worldwide.

Amid the furore around developer Jeff Minter's claims about Atari and its attempt to block the release of TxK on PC, PlayStation 4 and virtual reality devices, Atari has entered the fitness game market.

The news sparked a vociferous debate about the rights and wrongs of Atari's actions - but that hasn't stopped Atari from today entering the fitness market with a new app for iPhone, iPad, iPad touch and Android devices.

]]>http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-03-19-atari-launches-atari-fit-app
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1743924Thu, 19 Mar 2015 16:22:00 +0000PS2 and Xbox 360 versions of Final Fantasy 11 come to an end March 2016

The PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360 versions of 13-year-old MMO Final Fantasy 11 finally come to an end next year, Square Enix has announced.

But the PC version will live on.

Final Fantasy 11's final main scenario is called Rhapsodies of Vana'diel, and the first chapter of that will be added to the game in May 2015.

UPDATE 18/03/2015 7.29pm: Atari has responded to Minter's outrage with the following statement:

"Atari values and protects its intellectual property and expects others to respect its copyrights and trademarks. When Llamasoft launched TxK in early 2014, Atari was surprised and dismayed by the very close similarities between TxK and the Tempest franchise. Atari was not alone in noticing the incredible likeness between the titles. Several major gaming outlets also remarked at the similarity of features and overall appearance of TxK to Tempest; one stated of TxK, 'This is essentially Tempest.' There is no lawsuit. Atari has been in continuous contact with the developer since the game launched in hopes that the matter would be resolved."

Atari's response went on to point out a few outlets that likened TxK to Tempest in their reviews. The publisher offered the following quotes:

Cards Against Humanity - the comedic party game about matching funny, offensive cards to funny, offensive prompts - is now available for free online.

Dubbed Cards Against Originality, this web app was actually made by a third party developer named Dawson Whitfield. This is completely legal as the original Cards Against Humanity was made under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone is free to replicate and distribute it so long as it's not for profit.

One of Cards Against Humanity's original developers, Max Temkin, embraces this unofficial app. "I'm glad that our fans have been able to take Cards Against Humanity and remix it into their own original things; that's been a goal since we started working on our project," he told Endgadget. "Cards Against Humanity is obviously a remix of the comedy and games and pop culture that we love, and it's extremely cool to see our thing inspiring people to make stuff."

There are no plans to nerf either Hearthstone's Hunter Hero or the popular Dr. Boom card, according to game director Eric Dodds. The confirmation came as part of an interview with Eurogamer's dedicated Hearthstone sister site MetaBomb at Rezzed, the PC and indie gaming show hosted by Gamer Network.

Dr. Boom is an extremely popular character from the most powerful Legendary class of cards in Hearthstone. Not only does he appear on the board as a solid fighting force in his own right, he also summons a pair of low attack, low health mechanical contraptions which detonate on death to inflict even more damage against random enemy opponents.

It's certainly more powerful than similar cards of an equal resource cost, but it's the breadth of deck archetypes the doctor appears in that seems destined to keep him in rude health.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1742586Fri, 13 Mar 2015 08:52:00 +0000BBC is making a drama about the creation of Grand Theft Auto

The BBC is making a 90-minute live-action drama about the inception of Grand Theft Auto.

Games and tech journalist Guy Cocker called it "a 90-minute feature-length drama focussing on the people behind its creation."

The programme will be part of the BBC's Make it Digital initiative as an effort to generate interest in tech amongst youngsters.

Blizzard has unveiled the Blackrock Mountain Adventure for virtual card game Hearthstone.

Blackrock Mountain will be familiar to World of Warcraft players. It's the lair of Ragnaros, one of the iconic WOW bosses and a Legendary class card in Hearthstone.

The Blackrock Mountain Adventure includes a new board, five wings, 17 bosses and 31 new cards (five have been revealed). The first wing is Blackrock Depths, home to the Dark Iron dwarves - the first line of defense for Ragnaros. The second wing is The Molten Core.

Following in the footsteps of Ouya and Mad Catz, Nvidia is making an Android TV console.

Nvidia's first living-room entertainment device is the new Shield Android TV console, which uses Nvidia's Tegra X1 processor, an Android TV operating system and the Grid game streaming service to produce 4K video content and gameplay at 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second.

The console is sold with the Shield controller, and, Nvidia said, over 50 Android games optimised for Shield will be available to download, including shooters Crysis 3, Doom 3: BFG Edition and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

Knights of Pen & Paper 2 will be released for PC, iOS and Android devices on 14th May.

It's a sequel to the quirky pixelated role-playing game we really really liked in 2013. You play a bunch of people playing as a group of fantasy heroes - a game within a game. That allows plenty of tongue-in-cheek pokes at the RPG genre.

The game itself was limited but the sequel is beefier. It's now 16-bit with overhauled combat, new crafting, dynamically generated dungeons and more races and classes too.

UPDATE 26/02/2015 8.45pm: The Humble Square Enix Bundle 2 has added three new titles to its roster that are unlocked for paying above the average (currently $7.77 or about £5). These include: Kane & Lynch Collection, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, and Startopia.

Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile developer tri-Ace has been acquired by Japanese mobile company Nepro Japan.

Siliconera translated the announcement where it noted that the publisher hopes to develop more smartphone titles with the critically acclaimed console developer in its stable (along with another gaming subsidiary, Mobile & Game Studio).

While best known for the Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile series, tri-Ace also collaborated with Square Enix on Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13 and Final Fantasy 13-2 where it assisted in game design, artwork, programming and other areas. It also developed the 2010 RPG Resonance of Fate, which our Simon Parkin recommended.

Rez and Child of Eden creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi is making an iOS and Android puzzle game called 18.

As detailed by Japanese mobile game consultancy firm Kantan Games, Inc. (via NeoGAF), this upcoming mobile puzzler is being published by Mobcast and is expected to launch worldwide in the next month or so. In fact, it's already accepting pre-registration in Japan.

According Kantan Games' report - based on an earning's call from Mobcast - 18 "will blend a story line, puzzle mechanics, and battle RPG elements."

UPDATE 19/02/2015: We've got the first gameplay of Sonic Runners, the new Sonic mobile game.

The video, below, is Japanese, but we get a good look at what Sonic Runners will be like to play. We can also see Sonic's new, stockier design, at least compared to his look in the recent Sonic Boom games.

In Sonic Runners Sonic and his chums run automatically. You tap the screen to make him jump. It's due out in Japan in the spring.

Over the last 15 years, Eurogamer's parent company Gamer Network has launched a number of websites. Some, like Eurogamer and our US counterpart USGamer, are aimed squarely at consumers, while others like GamesIndustry.biz cater to industry interests. All of them share a common theme in covering the entire spectrum of gaming tastes.

There's a different sort of game though, and a different sort of audience, that can be hard for a generalist site to satisfy. League of Legends and DOTA 2 count their daily players in the millions, for example, while StarCraft 2's feverish following is well documented. There are plenty more besides, but one game in particular - Hearthstone - captured everyone's attention at Gamer Network last year.

Back in November, a few of us set about thinking how we could create an experimental website where we could share our passion for these sorts of games - and their constantly shifting metagames - exclusively and as spare time permits. The end result is a portal we call MetaBomb, and the game we're launching it with today is Hearthstone.

The long arm of Zenimax's lawyers has extended its reach yet again, this time slamming a cease-and-desist down on a mobile game that uses the word "Fallout" in its name.

Jordan Maron, aka CaptainSparklez, is a popular YouTube personality who has been working on Fortress Fallout, an iOS and Android free-to-download game in which you build a tower and then battle an opponent who has also built a tower. The first person to destroy their opponent's core is the winner.

In the video, below, Maron reveals a cease-and-desist letter sent by Zenimax that orders the name of the game be changed. Zenimax owns Bethesda, which owns the Fallout trademark and develops and publishes Fallout video games.

The story of how Peter Molyneux got his big break in the games industry is revealing. After his first game The Entrepreneur failed to sell, Molyneux gave up on games and started exporting baked beans to the Middle East. Soon afterwards Commodore, confusing Molyneux's company Taurus with a networking company called Torus, flew him to the States and mistakenly offered him ten brand-new Amigas.

"I remember it vividly going through my head," says Molyneux . "There was like an angel and a devil on my shoulder. One saying 'Go on you've got to tell the truth, you can't lie like this.' Then this other voice saying 'Just lie. Just lie, get the machines, and sort it out afterwards.' Of course, I ended up lying."

What would you have done? I like to think I'd have been a big enough man to come clean, but without being in that situation it's impossible to say.

During the early afternoon of 26th May 2013, 18-year-old Scot Bryan Henderson tapped on Peter Molyneux's Curiosity cube for the last time. He had won the game.

A tiny message appeared on the screen of his smartphone. It contained an email address for someone at 22Cans, the Guildford studio Molyneux had founded after leaving Microsoft and traditional game development behind.

Bryan, confused but intrigued, followed the instructions. Have I really won, he asked? An email appeared with a link to a video. In it Molyneux, dressed all in black and set against a virtual cube, delivers a message of congratulations.

Feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian is getting her own character model in local-multiplayer spectacular Towerfall: Ascension, developer Matt Makes Games has announced.

As part of its upcoming Dark World expansion, developer Matt Thorson is adding 10 new archers. One of these, the Blue Archer, is "loosely based on feminist games critic Anita Sarkeesian," the developer wrote on the game's official blog.

"Anita's work has been an inspiration to the TowerFall team," Thorson stated. "Her 'Tropes vs Women in Games' video series gave us a valuable new lens through which to assess our character designs. TowerFall is about bringing people together, so it's vitally important that the cast of playable characters makes everyone feel invited to join in. Simply put, this wouldn't have occurred to me if not for Anita, and feedback from players has reinforced how important it really is. We're very excited to immortalise Anita in a small way, as the alternate Last of the Order."

Team Bondi and Rockstar's 2011 detective game LA Noire promised much and achieved a great deal. But it was the reality of playing LA Noire after the hope it would be perhaps the first true detective game, after all those pretty words about fancy face technology and heart-pounding interrogations were said and done, that rubbed developer Sam Barlow up the wrong way.

"... obviously the reality of how that played out in LA Noire was not great," Barlow, who led design on the well-received Wii game Silent Hill: Shattered Memories while at Portsmouth-based developer Climax, tells me over Skype.

I liked LA Noire, although I couldn't bring myself to finish it. Bar the striking virtual recreation of 1940s Los Angeles, packed as it was with detail, flavour and atmosphere, Team Bondi's open world suffered from clunky combat, cumbersome driving and a crime scene investigation system that sparked more than a few humourous memes.

Destiny has more than 16 million registered users to date, Activision announced in a new earnings report.

While that doesn't exactly cover sales (as multiple folks in the same household can play from the same disc), it does give us a rough idea as to its success. The publisher also noted that it was the top-selling new IP in video game history.

Comparatively, Hearthstone has more than 25 million registered players.

Clock Tower creator Hifumi Kono has launched a Kickstarter for NightyCry, the spiritual successor to his point-and-click horror franchise. Better yet, the crowdfunding campaign contains plenty of footage of the game in action.

Like the Clock Tower games of yore, NightCry will be controlled with a minimalist point-and-click interface. Players will assume the role of a blonde woman wearing impractically loud heels as she tries to survive a night aboard a luxury cruise liner haunted by a mysterious figure brandishing a colossal pair of scissors.

Players wont be able to fight the monster, so instead they must hide and run from it.

There's a Warhammer 40K chess video game - and this is what it looks like.

Warhammer 40,000: Regicide includes a variety of battlefields based on the lore of Games Workshop's tabletop universe, as well as chess pieces re-imagined as Space Marines and Orks.

You can play Regicide using traditional chess rules, or spice things up with Regicide mode, which adds two phases of combat to the game, as well as the ability to open fire on enemies and use psychic powers.

]]>http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-04-warhammer-40k-regicide-is-battle-chess-with-chainsaws
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1734874Wed, 04 Feb 2015 11:51:00 +0000MineCon dated for July in London

MineCon, the Minecraft convention, is set for a 4th-5th July showing at the ExCeL London Exhibition and Conference Centre, Mojang has announced.

Tickets will go on sale here at an unspecified date later this month. They'll be sold off in two batches of 5000 tickets each. Purchasing a pass also gives you access to local hotel discounts.

The convention itself will consist of panels, contests, tournaments, events and a yet-to-be-announced show on the night of the 4th.

UPDATE: There will be "limited" redundancies at Sega of Europe, the company has told Eurogamer.

"We are under consultation with a limited number of staff in the European publishing business and will be able to confirm decisions regarding any potential redundancies in the coming weeks," a spokesperson said.

The Undertaker, one of Hearthstone's most popular and powerful cards, is to be nerfed in an upcoming patch.

Considered overpowered by many in the community, the Undertaker starts off as a relatively weak minion when put into play, but becomes increasingly more powerful as each creature with the Deathrattle mechanic is played alongside it. For each one of these creatures, the Undertaker gains one additional Attack point, and one additional Health point.

So what's the problem? The Undertaker only costs a single resource point, which means it can be played on the first turn, and then quickly beefed up with equally cheap Deathrattle minions on subsequent turns. Before the game has barely begun, one player will often find themselves in possession of a monstrous creation that can dominate much of the match, and leave the opponent with few options to catch up.

My daughter asked me the other day what my favourite thing to do was. She's at the age where she asks a lot of these questions. I said, after some consideration, "make stuff." Then she asked what was my favourite thing about making stuff, which led to more consideration.

When you review an expansion for a game like Hearthstone, you're appraising the community that plays it every bit as much as you are the new tools forged by Blizzard's blacksmiths. And this particular community is for the most part remarkably conservative; one that prefers to huddle around the warmth of an established fireside rather than seek out new flames. It's to the internet that the majority of players turn - rather than their own card collections - in order to craft the latest and greatest decks.

What that means in practice is that the first month of Hearthstone's first full expansion has been dominated by a gradual, grudging evolution of the old order, rather than the sort of explosive revolution thematically suggested by the new mechanical characters and contraptions of Goblins vs Gnomes.

One by one, reliable cards are nudged out of established decks with no small amount of hesitation, to be replaced with a new card that synergises just a little better with the rest of the deck. The fine details have changed a great deal, in other words, but the broader brush strokes remain the same - for the most part. Certainly anyone who feared that their hard-won combat experience would be made redundant by this fresh content drop can rest easy.